Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism, reflecting the often turbulent nature of their development. Throughout their history, the avant-garde and modernists have both confronted and instigated crises, be they economic or political, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. The seventh volume in the series European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies addresses the myriad ways in which the avant-garde and modernism have responded and related to crisis from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. How have Europe's avant-garde and modernist movements given aesthetic shape to their crisis-laden trajectory? Given the many different watershed moments the avant-garde and modernism have faced over the centuries, what common threads link the critical points of their development? Alternatively, what kinds of crises have their experimental practices and critical modes yielded? The volume assembles case studies reflecting upon these questions and more from across all areas of avant-garde and modernist activity, including visual art, literature, music, architecture, photography, theatre, performance, curatorial practice, fashion and design.

Presentations of offerings to the emperor-king on anniversaries of his accession became an important imperial ritual in the court of Franz Joseph I. This book explores for the first time the identity constructions of Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem as expressed in their gifts to the Austro-Hungarian Kaisers at the time of dramatic events. It reveals how the beautiful gifts, their dedications, and their narratives, were perceived by gift-givers and recipients as instruments capable of acting upon various social, cultural and political processes. Lily Arad describes in a captivating manner the historical narratives of the creation and presentation of these gifts. She analyzes the iconography of these gifts as having transformative effect on the self-identification of the Jewish communities and examines their reception by the Kaisers and in the Austrian and the Palestinian Jewish press. This groundbreaking book unveils Jewish cultural and political strategies aimed to create local Eretz-Israel identities, demonstrating distinct positive communal identification which at times expressed national sentiments and at the same time preserved European identification.

Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945. Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown. They introduce greater depth and specificity to familiar artists and movements, such as Lettrism, Situationist International or Nouveau Realisme, while bringing to the fore lesser known artists and groups, including GRAPUS, the Sociological Art Collective, and Nicolas Schoeffer. Collectively, they stress the political dimensions and social ambitions of the art produced in France at the time, deconstruct the traditional geography of the French art world, and highlight the multiculturalism of the French art scene that resulted from its colonial past and the constant flux of artistic travels and migrations. Ultimately, the book contributes to a story of postwar art in which France can be inscribed not as a main or sub chapter, but rather as a vector in the wider constellation of modern and contemporary art.

LAND ART IN THE U.K.

A new book on land art in Great Britain. There are chapters on land artists such as Chris Drury, Hamish Fulton, David Nash, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. All of the major practitioners of land and environmental art in the U.K. are discussed.

EXTRACT FROM THW CHAPTER ON ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

One wonders whether Andy Goldsworthy would like to work in snow and ice more than in any other medium. In temperate snowlands one feels Goldsworthy is very much at home. Snow has all the right sorts of qualities Goldsworthy looks for in a material: it is malleable, it melts and changes, its whiteness makes for good, contrasty imagery photographically, and it seasonally alters the landscape, and later dissolves into it.

In Goldsworthy s snowworks one senses also the sheer fun working with snow. For people in most of Britain, snow is not a occurrence each year, as it is in, say, Northern Russia or Alaska. Snow can be an exciting event (but British adults usually gripe it). Snow was a perennial delight and shock for Goldsworthy. In Midsummer Snowballs he wrote that e]ven in winter each snowfall is a shock, unpredictable and unexpected.

Goldsworthy retained the child-like enjoyment of snow falling in Britain throughout his life. While much of the U.K. grinds to a halt at the sight of a snowflake, Goldsworthy has the child s joy when it snows (school s cancelled, snowball fights, ice skating, sledging, and making snowmen and snowballs).

Andy Goldsworthy speaks in wonder and awe of the effect, the excitement of the first snowfall. Some of this excitement comes across in Goldsworthy s snowworks. He has made, for example, patterns in the snow by rolling a snowball around a field, exactly as kids do when it snows (1982 and 1987).

Some of Goldsworthy s earliest works with snow were large snowballs. In some of these early snow pieces, Goldsworthy placed snowballs in areas such as woods and fields which didn t have any snow, so the snowballs stood out in the trees and grass (as in Ilkley, Yorkshire, 1981).

"Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior "examines the interior as a "stage" upon which modern life and lifestyles are consciously fashioned and "performed," and from which modern identities are projected by and through design. Scholars from Europe, Canada, America and Australia present a range of interior environments--domestic interiors, sets for stage and film, exhibition spaces, art galleries, hotel lobbies, cafes and retail spaces--to explore each as an intersection of fashion, lifestyle and performance. Sharing the thesis that the fashionably dressed body and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, the essays highlight the ways in which interiors can give shape to and dramatize modern life.

Stretching beyond the Western canon and the literary scope of the field, this volume reconsiders what ""modernism"" means by exploring numerous local expressions of modernity around the globe. Masks - both literal and metaphorical - play a role in each of these artistic ventures, from Brazilian music to Chinese film to Nigerian masquerade performance. These case studies show how masks enable diverse artists and communities to grapple with deep societal transformations caused by modern transnational forces. The contributors challenge popular assumptions about what modernism looks like and what modernity is.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010. Designing the Modern Interior reveals how the design of the inside spaces of our homes and public buildings is shaped by and shapes our modern culture. The modern interior has often been narrowly defined by the minimalist work of elite, reforming architects. But a shared modernising impulse, expressed in interior design, extends at least as far back as the Victorians and reaches to our own time. And this spirit of modernisation manifested itself in interiors, designed both by professionals and by amateurs, which did not necessarily look modern and often even aimed to imitate the past. Designing the Modern Interior presents a new history of the interior from the late 19th to the 21st century. Particular characteristics are consistent across this period: a progressive attitude towards technology; a hyper-consciousness of what it is to live in the present and the future; an overt relationship with the mass media, mass consumption and the marketplace; an emphasis on individualism, interiority and the 'self'; the construction of identities determined by gender, class, race, sexuality and nationhood; and the experiences of urban and suburban life.

Transforming Type examines kinetic or moving type in a range of fields including film credits, television idents, interactive poetry and motion graphics. As the screen increasingly imitates the properties of real-life environments, typographic sequences are able to present letters that are active and reactive. These environments invite new discussions about the difference between motion and change, global and local transformation, and the relationship between word and image. In this illuminating study, Barbara Brownie explores the ways in which letterforms transform on screen, and the consequences of such transformations. Drawing on examples including Kyle Cooper's title sequence design, kinetic poetry and MPC's idents for the UK's Channel 4, she differentiates motion from other kinds of kineticism, with particular emphasis on the transformation of letterforms into other forms and objects, through construction, parallax and metamorphosis. She proposes that each of these kinetic behaviours requires us to revisit existing assumptions about the nature of alphabetic forms and the spaces in which they are found.

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY: TOUCHING NATURE DESCRIPTION

A new and revised edition of our best-selling book on Andy Goldsworthy. A completely rewritten exploration of the sculptor, updated to include recent works such as Night Path (2002) and Chalk Stones (2003) in Sussex, Three Cairns (2002) on the American East and West coasts, Stone Houses (2004) and Garden of Stones (2003) in Gotham, Passage (2005) in London, and Slate Domes (2005) in Washington, DC.

Known as a land, earth, nature or environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy works with(in) nature. He uses natural materials in natural shapes and forms often set in natural contexts (but also in cities, towns, parks, sculpture parks, and many spaces created or adapted by people). FROM THE INTRODUCTION

In the 1990s, Andy Goldsworthy s art began to rise in popularity: the glossy coffee table book Stone became a bestseller (bear in mind it was then priced at $55). In 1994 Goldsworthy took over some West End galleries with a large one-man show. In 1995 he was part of an intriguing group show at the British Museum (Time Machine), creating sculptures, along with Richard Deacon, Peter Randall-Page and others, in amongst the monumental statuary of the famous Egyptian Hall. Also in 1995, Goldsworthy designed a set of Royal Mail stamps (and again in 2003). Digne in France became an increasingly important Goldsworthy location, with shows in 1995, 1997 and 2000). Prestigious commissions occurred in the US from the mid-1990s onwards. For instance: the giant Wall at Storm King Art Center in 1998; the Three Cairns on the East and West Coasts and Iowa in 2001-02; the stone houses at the Metropolitan Museum in Gotham in 2004; the monument to the Holocaust (also in New York) in 2003; and the slate domes in Washington, DC in 2005. Goldsworthy continues to work in countries such as Japan, Australia, Holland, Canada, North America and France (with France and the US becoming primary centres of Goldsworthy activity), but his home ground of Dumfriesshire in Scotland remains (at) the heart of his work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations.

A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.

For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art was almost exclusively deemed political propaganda imposed from on high, devoid of any aesthetic significance. In this book, Evgeny Dobrenko suggests an entirely new view: socialism did not produce Socialist Realism to "prettify reality"; rather, Socialist Realism itself produced socialism by elevating socialism to reality status, giving it material form. Without art, socialism could not have materialized. Bringing together the Soviet historical experience and Stalin-era art-novels, films, poems, songs, painting, photography, architecture, and advertising-Dobrenko examines Stalinism's representational strategies and demonstrates how real socialism was begotten of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism, he concludes, was Stalinism's most effective sociopolitical institution.

The ninth volume of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies is dedicated to Russian Futurism and gathers ten studies that investigate the impact of F.T. Marinetti's visit to Russia in 1914; the neglected region of the Russian Far East; the artist and writers Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasily Kamensky, Maria Siniakova and Vladimir Mayakovsky; the artistic media of advertising, graphic arts, cinema and artists' books.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, with Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso. Brancusi's influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and land artists.

This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Constantin Brancusi's distinctive scultpural forms, the 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until only the essence was left.

It was Constantin Brancusi's project to strip away the detritus that had accumulated around sculpture, Henry Moore said, and to offer the pure, simple shape. What Brancusi did was 'to concentrate on very simple shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.'

As well as being a sculptor, Constantin Brancusi was also an accomplished photographer. Quite a few artists (not all of them sculptors) have expressed for Brancusi's photographs, and the way he would set up his sculptures inhis studio and photograph them at particular times of the day, when the lightingwas just right. They are early examples of installation art (and some of the best, too). Andy Goldsworthy said he admired how Brancusi created the right conditions in his studio so that his work 'comes alive at a particular time of the day as the light momentarily touches it'. For Goldsworthy, Brancusi's works were at their best when they were arranged by the sculptor in his studio and photographed. Somehow, it wasn't quite the same when they were displayed in modern art museums (such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in Gotham, which have important Brancusi pieces).

Fully illustrated, including many photos of Brancusi's studio in Paris, and the art of his contemporaries.

Providing a detailed annotated bibliography and research guide to the Stieglitz Circle and four of its leading members--Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Max Weber--this new sourcebook offers a chapter on each of the four artists. Complete with biographical essay and guides to writings, statements, correspondence, books, articles, reviews, reference sources, and archival sources, each artist's chapter gives the researcher an exhaustive catalogue of relevant material.

The only such annotated sourcebook currently available on the Stieglitz Circle, R. Scott Harnsberger's work offers lists of annotated reproductions of each artist's works, keyed to over 600 source volumes not mentioned elsewhere in the volume, including catalogues of museums, galleries, private collections, thematic exhibitions, and auction firms.

The Nature of Revolution provides the first account of art and politics under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. James A. Tyner repositions Khmer Rouge artworks within their proper political and economic context: the materialization of a political organization in an era of anticolonial and decolonization movements. Consequently, both the organization's policies and practices?including the production of poetry, music, and photography?were incontrovertibly shaped by and created to further the Khmer Rouge's agenda.Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, Tyner's work examines the social dimensions of the Khmer Rouge, while contributing broadly to a growing literature on the intersection of art and politics. Building on the foundational works of theorists such as Jacques Ranciere, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, Tyner explores the insights of Leon Trotsky and his descriptions of the politics of aesthetics specific to socialist revolutions. Ultimately, Tyner reveals a fundamental tension between individuality and bureaucratic control and its impact on artistic creativity and freedom.

The effort to go beyond given knowledge in different domains - artistic, scientific, political, metaphysical - is a characteristic driving force in modernism and the avant-gardes. Since the late 19th century, artists and writers have frequently investigated their medium and its limits, pursued political and religious aims, and explored hitherto unknown physical, social and conceptual spaces, often in ways that combine these forms of critical inquiry into one and provoke further theoretical and methodological innovations. The fifth volume of the EAM series casts light on the history and actuality of investigations, quests and explorations in the European avant-garde and modernism from the late 19th century to the present day. The authors seek to answer questions such as: How have modernism and the avant-garde appropriated scientific knowledge, religious dogmas and social conventions, pursuing their investigation beyond the limits of given knowledge and conceptions? How have modernism and avant-garde created new conceptual models or representations where other discourses have allegedly failed? In what ways do practises of investigation, quest or exploration shape artistic work or the formal and thematic structures of artworks?

In the 1930s, the exciting urban environment of Montreal provided the perfect venue for a varied group of people who came together to form a kind of “salon” in the turmoil of the Great Depression. For ten years, these friends and acquaintances met each week at the home of the artist John Lyman. They saw themselves as “modern,” a part of the avant-garde that was then busily changing the world. These Canadian modernists supported left-wing causes, advocated a more stable social order, and heralded a more inclusive culture. More than anything, they searched for a way in which their lives wouldhave meaning. In The Last Ulysseans, Molly Pulver Ungar describes this dynamic group’s private and public activities of the group from the beginning of the Great Depression through the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the final years of the 1930s. In face of the ominous certainty of another war in Europe, these individuals reached a new understanding of what it meant to live a modern, meaningful life. Their conscious pursuit of new directions in outlook, attitude, and lifestyle influenced many of the changes in post-war North American society.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, along with Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso. Brancusi's influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and land artists.

This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Constantin Brancusi's distinctive scultpural forms, the 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until only the essence was left.

It was Constantin Brancusi's project to strip away the detritus that had accumulated around sculpture, Henry Moore said, and to offer the pure, simple shape. What Brancusi did was 'to concentrate on very simple shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.'

As well as being a sculptor, Constantin Brancusi was also an accomplished photographer. Quite a few artists (not all of them sculptors) have expressed for Brancusi's photographs, and the way he would set up his sculptures inhis studio and photograph them at particular times of the day, when the lightingwas just right. They are early examples of installation art (and some of the best, too). Andy Goldsworthy said he admired how Brancusi created the right conditions in his studio so that his work 'comes alive at a particular time of the day as the light momentarily touches it'. For Goldsworthy, Brancusi's works were at their best when they were arranged by the sculptor in his studio and photographed. Somehow, it wasn't quite the same when they were displayed in modern art museums (such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in Gotham, which have important Brancusi pieces).

Fully illustrated, including many photos of Constantin Brancusi's studio in Paris, Brancusi's works in museums in New York, Washington and L.A., and the art of his contemporaries.

With bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861713599. 180 pages.

This new (5th) edition has been revised.

www.crmoon.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The art of Constantin Brancusi never ceases to fascinate and inspire, and it always seems fresh, as if it had been created fives minutes ago, no matter how many times you look at it. When you encounter a Brancusi sculpture in a museum, it pops out, clear and direct; there is simply nothing else like Brancusi's art in history. I have tried to explore the key elements of Brancusi's art, and the important events in his development as a sculptor. I have also included comparisons with other artists of the period, and also how Brancusi's art has influenced many subsequent artists.